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Case-insensitive by default

Worth knowing before your first run, because it is the setting most likely to produce a surprise.

Searching for cat matches Cat and CAT as well, and replaces all of them with exactly what you typed. So replacing cat with dog turns a sentence-opening Cat into a lowercase dog.

The [msm_tool slug="find-and-replace"] has a case-sensitive option, and for anything where capitalisation carries meaning — names, code identifiers, sentence starts — it is the one you want.

Whole words, and why partial matches bite

Without whole-word matching, a search for cat also matches the middle of concatenate, category and indicated. Replacing it produces condogenate, which is the classic demonstration and happens constantly in practice.

The rule: if you are replacing a word, match whole words. If you are replacing a fragment — a URL, a prefix, a file extension — you cannot, and you should read the preview more carefully.

Order matters when you make several replacements

Replacements are applied in sequence, and each one runs on the result of the last. That creates a specific trap:

Replace A with B, then B with C, and everything that was originally A is now C. You wanted two separate substitutions and got a chain.

The fix is to route through a placeholder that appears nowhere in the text — replace A with a unique marker, then B with C, then the marker with B. Awkward, and reliable.

The same applies to swapping two values. There is no way to do it in two steps without the intermediate collision.

Check the count before you commit

The number of replacements is the single most useful thing to look at. If you expected three and it reports forty-seven, stop — something is matching that you did not intend, and it is almost always a partial match or a case difference.

A count of zero is equally informative. It usually means a typo in the search term, a trailing space, or a character that looks like the one you typed and is not — a curly quote where you typed a straight one, or a non-breaking space where you typed a normal one.

Quotes and dashes that look identical

Text from a word processor or a website carries typographic characters: curly quotes, en dashes, ellipsis characters. They look like their plain equivalents and are different code points.

Searching for "quoted" with straight quotes will not find “quoted” with curly ones. This is behind a large share of the searches that mysteriously find nothing, and the fix is to copy the search term out of the text itself rather than typing it.

Where this is the right tool

• Changing a name, a term or a URL consistently through a document.
• Cleaning up a placeholder left in a template.
• Converting a delimiter — commas to tabs, semicolons to newlines.
• Stripping a repeated prefix or suffix from a list of lines.

Where it is not

Anything requiring judgement about context. Replacing a word only when it appears as a noun, or only outside quotation marks, or only in some sections, is not a find-and-replace job — and attempting it with a clever search term is how documents get quietly corrupted.

Keep the original. Everything happens in your browser, so nothing is uploaded, but nothing is undoable either.